Just before the
30th anniversary of Hun Sen’s first becoming prime minister of Cambodia, Human
Rights Watch produced a 75-page attack on him. Perhaps the strangest thing
about the HRW document was the amount of attention it received in the
English-language media.
HRW attacking
Hun Sen is the kind of story that editors call “dog bites man”; it’s not news
because that’s what dogs do. HRW has been attacking Hun Sen for as long as can
be remembered by anyone who cares. The latest attack adds little or nothing of
substance to the earlier attacks. The editors who regarded the latest HRW
diatribe as newsworthy must be very young or have very short memories.
They, or their
journalists assigned to treat the document as something serious, must also have
very limited critical skills, because they don’t seem to have noticed a great
many pointers that suggest that HRW’s “report” is not an objective summary of
reality but a propaganda extravaganza.
Back to the
Cold War
One of these
pointers is the quite public history of HRW. It is very much a product of the
Cold War, having been set up in the US in 1978 as “Helsinki Watch” to publicise
real or otherwise violations of human rights in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe.
Helsinki Watch
proved so useful for US interests that similar “Watches” for the Americas,
Asia, Africa and the Middle East were created. Eventually they were all
amalgamated into Human Rights Watch in a process so smooth that it alone was
proof they were all part of the same operation from the beginning.
HRW today claims
that it does not accept funding from any government. There is no way for any
outside observer to know whether or not that is true, and it hardly matters.
HRW is openly funded by rich people, most of whom would not have so much spare
cash if the US government made them pay taxes even at the same rate as much
less wealthy citizens, let alone at progressive rates.
In particular,
currency speculator George Soros, who became a multi-billionaire by
capitalising on the 1997 financial crisis that impoverished governments and
millions of poor people in Asia, is
giving HRW $10 million a year for 10 years. Soros is well known for his
hostility to any remnants of the formerly socialist regimes in Eastern Europe
and the rest of the world.
The HRW
document’s author is Brad Adams, HRW’s Asia director. This would not be a
surprise to anyone familiar with Adams or HRW. During his five years in
Cambodia (1997-2002), Adams was notorious for his hatred of the CPP in general
and of Hun Sen in particular, and the HRW document betrays this hatred from the
first page – not even pretending to be objective.
For a start,
some intern in HRW went through probably scores of films a frame at a time to
find the most grotesque facial expression of Hun Sen possible to decorate the
cover of HRW’s attack document. Then, just in case readers are too stupid to
realise what is intended by the still from a video, the title declares: “30
Years of Hun Sen: “Violence, Repression, and Corruption in Cambodia”.
Did anything
besides violence, repression and corruption happen in Cambodia during the last
30 years? For example, was a civil war ended? Has there been significant
reconstruction of infrastructure? Are there now thousands more schools than
there were 30 years ago? Were the top leaders of the Khmer Rouge who destroyed
Cambodian society in the late 1970s brought to trial? Is there a booming
domestic and international tourist trade showing millions of people the glories
of Cambodia’s ancient civilisation? Has the country’s per capita GDP increased
from well under one dollar a day to more than $1000 a year? Is Cambodia in
“danger” of moving out of the category of “least developed countries” very
soon?
Don’t ask: in
this document, anything that has gone wrong in Cambodia since 1985 or even
earlier is Hun Sen’s fault. In it, nothing good has happened, but if it did, it
was due to someone outside the CPP, and Hun Sen was opposed to it.
Repeat
offender
The first Brad
Adams falsification about Hun Sen that I can recall coming across occurred in
2002, when Adams persuaded the Phnom Penh Post to accept a major article
supposedly based on what Adams called an “official” Thai government document –
which it obviously was not. I pointed out the falsity of that document in the
following issue of the Post (https://letters2pppapers.wordpress.com/archives/pre-2005/a-dubious-document-and-kr-trials/)
and have done so several times since then, but Adams has never publicly
explained or defended his article.
The current
document is no more honest, although its falsifications are usually not quite
as blatant as the 2002 Post effort. It would be tedious and unnecessary
to go through them all one at a time, but I will cite a few characteristic
examples.
Adams does his
best to blame Hun Sen for every problem that arose in the K5 program, the
unsuccessful attempt in the mid-1980s to build a barrier along the border to prevent
Khmer Rouge attacks from Thailand. A particularly damning accusation – that Hun
Sen friends and subordinates were given improper exemptions from participating
– is cited as coming from Kong Korm in a 1999 interview with Adams.
Adams describes
Kong Korm as “deputy minister of foreign affairs at the start of K5 and later
appointed minister of foreign affairs in 1987”. It certainly sounds like Adams
has the goods here: a former CPP government official pointing the finger at Hun
Sen. Except that Adams forgot to record one little detail: at the time of the
interview, Kong Korm was an official and a senator for the Sam Rainsy Party (he
is still a CNRP senator). “A senator from the SRP said …” doesn’t sound as
convincing as “A former [CPP] foreign minister said …”.
For his chapter
“Hun Sen and PRK Repression in the 1980s”, Adams again knows how to select his
sources. In this case, they sound more reliable: two publications, one by
Amnesty International and one by the US Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Only
in passing, near the end of gruesome tales of torture and unjust persecution,
does Adams mention that the two organisations conducted their interviews “on
the Thailand-Cambodia border” – a euphemism meaning that they occurred in camps
controlled by the Khmer Rouge, not exactly an encouraging setting for impartial
research on the government in Phnom Penh.
Sometimes, Adams
dispenses with evidence entirely, simply asserting as fact something that is
questionable at best. For instance, he says that the 1998 elections “were
neither free nor fair” without citing any source whatsoever for this judgment –
probably because the main international observer groups disagreed with him.2
In regard to the
2003 election, he says that “the election process was denounced by European
Union and other monitors” but provides no references that would allow a check
on what these monitors actually said, how many of them said it and so on. The
Australian government’s ABC Radio, reporting on 30 July 2003, said of the
election: “International election monitors … say they're ‛reasonably satisfied’
that the poll was free and fair …”
The most recent
election is given similar but more extensive treatment: a series of sweeping
assertions not backed up by any citations whatsoever. For example, Adams
asserts that the elections were “widely condemned as neither free nor fair by domestic and international monitoring groups” without mentioning
that Sam Rainsy campaigned to dissuade potential monitors from observing the
election3 and without disclosing that the monitors from the
International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP) and the Centrist
Asia Pacific Democrats International (CAPDI) described the elections as “free,
fair and transparent, and, above all, peaceful, non-violent and smooth”. He
describes the voter list as “marred by CPP-orchestrated fraud and other
irregularities”, again without citing any specifics or evidence, without
mentioning that the opposition boycotted the voter registration process so that
it could complain about it later and without hinting at the existence of the
procedures available to anyone to challenge the inclusion or exclusion of any
name on the voter list.
Adams’
distortions about the establishment and functioning of the ECCC to try senior
leaders of the Khmer Rouge and those most responsible for its worst crimes are
grotesque and will be easily identified by anyone familiar with the reality. As
in Adams’ presentation of other events, any delay or problem is the fault of
Hun Sen, and any faltering step forward is the result of some non-Cambodian
overcoming Hun Sen’s resistance.
This approach is
completely in line with another fact that Adams forgets to tell his readers.
From the beginning, HRW was opposed to the creation of a tribunal in Cambodia,
demanding one in The Hague, in which Cambodians would have participated only as
defendants or witnesses. This is an additional reason, in addition to attacking
Hun Sen, for Adams to misrepresent the real history of the ECCC.
Here I will cite
just one instance which Adams could have learned easily enough if he ever
talked to people who weren’t interested in besmirching Hun Sen. Adams writes
that, when the ECCC convened, the Cambodian judges “prolonged negotiations to
establish the court’s internal working rules, further delaying the start of
proceedings”.
Typically (see
the final section of this article), the “source” for this assertion is a
December 2006 HRW press release. What really happened was that, well in advance
of the July 2006 meeting of the judges, the Cambodian government task force for
the trials enlisted a US legal scholar to study Cambodian criminal procedure
and the rules of major international war crimes trials and prepare draft rules
for the ECCC based on those texts. On reading it, one of the international
judges proposed adopting that draft provisionally and then going through it to
modify it as necessary. Unfortunately, other international judges objected and
insisted on writing new rules from scratch. The resulting delay of a year was in
no way due to the Cambodian judges.
The “further”
delay in getting the ECCC under way that Adams refers to occurred because a
Cambodian national election was held in 2003, shortly after the agreement to
establish the ECCC was signed with the UN. After the election, the SRP and
Funcinpec boycotted the new National Assembly, which did not meet for more than
a year and therefore could not ratify the agreement. Adams doesn’t mention this
fact, presumably because it is hard to blame on Hun Sen.
(It may be relevant
that another Soros-funded organisation, the Open Society Justice Initiative,
has been extremely critical and obstructive of the ECCC’s functioning.)
Peculiar
‛evidence’
When Adams does
cite sources, it is not much of an improvement. If we leave aside the executive
summary, which has no footnotes, and the first 15 or so pages of the report,
which are concerned with pre-1979 events and thus irrelevant to Hun Sen’s years
as prime minister, the document contains 122 footnotes appearing to cite
evidence for Adams’ accusations.
These citations
are often not what they seem at first glance. For example, there is a footnote
to Adams’ assertion that the bodyguard unit Brigade 70 is “notorious” for a
“litany” of misdeeds. But that footnote only cites the government sub-decree
that established the brigade; it says nothing about any evidence of misdeeds. A
discussion of alleged internal divisions in the CPP in 1994 cites only a Rasmei
Kampuchea report of the appointment of Hok Lundy as head of the National
Police.
Even more
problematic are the numerous citations (46 out of the 122) that refer to HRW or
Adams himself. A dozen of these citations are of interviews conducted by Adams.
As we have seen, he is not a critical and perceptive interviewer or a reliable
reporter on any matter connected with Hun Sen.
There are four
further interviews listed as conducted by HRW, not giving the name of the
interviewer. Their quality may perhaps be judged by this example. Footnote 190
is cited in support of the statement: “CPP-controlled courts [in 1998] filed
politically motivated prosecutions against SRP members on trumped-up charges of attempting to
kill the prime minister”. The note reads in its entirety: “Human Rights Watch
interview with Cambodian judicial officers, Phnom Penh, September 23, 2014.”
Think about
that: judicial officers told HRW that “courts” deliberately filed false
charges against SRP members. There are three possibilities here. One is that
the “judicial officers” themselves were involved in the false charges. Why they
would decide to confess to HRW 16 years later is not apparent. The second
possibility is that they had no first-hand knowledge of the case(s) but were
repeating something they had heard. That would make their testimony irrelevant
at best, unless they had heard it directly from other judicial officers who
were involved in the “trumping-up”, and it would again raise the question of
why anyone would come clean only to HRW so long after the fact. The third
possibility is that Adams and/or HRW aren’t giving us an accurate account, or
are retelling the testimony of unreliable witnesses.
Adams doesn’t
tell his readers, but that passage from the document is apparently a reference
to the 24 September 1998 rocket attack on Hun Sen’s motorcade in Siem Reap. I
don’t know whether the police succeeded in finding the real culprits, but the
attack itself was certainly not trumped up: it killed a young boy and wounded
three other people; foreign bomb disposal experts found three other rockets
that failed to fire because they had been soaked by heavy rain (New York
Times, 26 September 1998).
‛It must be true: we said it’
At least 28 of
these citations of “evidence” in fact refer to previous documents of
HRW. Fifteen refer to HRW’s annual World Reports. These contain no
evidence, but are merely summaries of the views of HRW officials (presumably
including Brad Adams); those views may or may not be based on correctly understood
and reliable evidence, but the reader of those World Reports is given no
opportunity to judge this. So the current document’s citations of the World
Reports mean nothing more than: “We’ve said this before”.
In addition to
pretending to offer evidence without doing so, Adams’ procedure here lends
itself to a further distortion. In 1999, a Battambang SRP activist named Chhum Doeun was murdered. Today, Adams
declares that this was an instance of “violent repression” of the SRP by the
CPP, claiming to document this with a reference to the HRW 2000 World
Report. But what the World Report says is significantly different: “The motive is thought
to have been political …” The 2000 report says that the motive “is thought” to
be political, although it doesn’t say who thought this. Adams in 2015 converts
this into an “instance” of CPP attacks on the SRP, without any suggestion that
this might be open to question.
(This was the only citation of
the HRW World Reports that I checked to see if Adams cited it accurately;
I chose it because it was the first such citation.)
Most of the 13 other Adams
citations of HRW documents are of press releases commenting on some current
event in Cambodia: that is, like the World Reports, they tell us only
what HRW thought about something. Again, Adams may also exaggerate what these
earlier documents said. For example, in regard to the negotiations to establish
the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Adams claims: “Hun Sen engaged in a prolonged game of
stonewalling UN negotiators, prompting a
decision
in 2002 by the UN to pull out of talks with his government”. This is not at all
what the UN officials said at the time, and it is also not what HRW said in the
press release that Adams cites. That release was actually rather vague on the
UN’s motives, but implied that the UN was unhappy with the law passed by the
National Assembly the previous year and signed by the King in August 2001.
The other three or four
citations of HRW appear to be earlier “reports” like the current one.
Overall, HRW’s approach seems to
be that they are the “good guys”, and therefore the world should accept what
they say; there is no need to check “facts” that support their views or to
consider the evidence of anyone or anything that contradicts their views. The
attempted hatchet job on Hun Sen certainly exemplifies that attitude.
-----
1. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman
commented on these events: “[N]obody who has read a business magazine in the
last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who
not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their
best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit. These new actors on the scene
do not yet have a standard name; my proposed term is ‛Soroi’.”
2. Journalist Susan Downie, who disagreed with the
monitors, was honest enough to report what they said: “... the two main
international observer groups effectively declared voting day and counting day
free and fair.” (Australian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 54,
No. 1, 2000)
3. “Rainsy tells election observers to stay away”, Cambodia
Daily, 25 February 2013.
By Allen Myers
